She flowed through their ranks, a specter of graceful, effortless death. A palm strike here, a simple finger poke there. Every touch was fatal.
Her "palm force" was not a force at all; it was a conceptual attack. With every touch, she was not striking them; she was introducing the pure, absolute law of 'combustion' into their bodies.
Their own spiritual energy became the fuel for their utter annihilation. There was no defense. There was no resistance.
They died in droves. Their terrifying techniques, their powerful artifacts, their years of bitter cultivation it all meant nothing.
They were moths flying into a sun, their lives extinguished with contemptuous ease. The slaughter was so swift, so one-sided,
so utterly absolute that it ceased to be a battle. It was a culling.
Within minutes, the sky that had been filled with a terrifying army was empty. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and the taste of ash. Three hundred Nascent Soul cultivators,
A force that represented a significant portion of the Thunder Light Sect's power, were gone. Not a single body, not a single drop of blood, remained.
Silence.
A huge, suffocating silence descended once more. Everyone, from Lan Tianzheng to the lowest mortal servant, stared at the girl in white, who now floated alone in the center of the hall,
Not a single speck of dust on her uniform, not a single hair out of place. She looked as if she had just been for a pleasant stroll.
The ten Void Refinement masters of the Thunder Light Sect stood frozen, their faces drained of all color.
Their arrogant smirks were long gone, replaced by a mixture of stark terror and disbelief. This wasn't a prodigy. This wasn't a genius. This was a monster wearing the skin of a human girl.
Finally, one of the peak Void Refinement elders, a man with a long, gaunt face, managed to find his voice. His face was as black as the bottom of a pot, his eyes burning with a mixture of fear and irrepressible fury.
"Who… are you?" he demanded, his voice strained, each word a struggle. "Where did you come from?!"
Huo Ling'er turned her calm gaze upon him. The playful, mocking air was gone, replaced by a cold, formal dignity.
She spoke, and her voice, though not loud, boomed across the city, across the heavens, and into the annals of history.
"Eternal Sect," she declared, her voice clear and absolute. "Fire Peak Direct Disciple, Huo Ling'er."
The sentence was a thunderclap that dwarfed anything the Thunder Light Sect could produce. A collective, horrified gasp swept through the thousands of onlookers.
Eternal Sect.
The name, the myth, the walking apocalypse. It was real. And this… this angel of death was one of them.
The casual slaughter, the impossible power, the absolute confidence it all clicked into place. The world tilted on its axis, and every cultivator present knew,
With chilling certainty, that they were witnessing a turning point in the history of the Western Region.
The name, spoken with such cold, simple finality, hung in the ash-filled air like a death sentence.
"Eternal Sect, Fire Peak Direct Disciple, Huo Ling'er !"
It was a key, unlocking a torrent of forbidden knowledge and terrified whispers that had been plaguing the Western Region for the past month.
In the minds of the thousands of cultivators present, fragmented, horrifying narratives began to violently stitch themselves together.
The Eternal Sect. A month ago, the name was unknown, a footnote on the Goddess Nexus registry listed as a mere 9th-tier low-level sect.
A sect so insignificant that the Li Family, another 9th-tier power, felt confident enough to invade it over some minor grievance.
The next day, the Li Family, from their patriarch to their youngest child, had ceased to exist. Their mountain had been turned into a crater. It was the first tremor.
Then came the second, more public earthquake. A single disciple of this unknown sect, a young man named Lin Feng, had ventured out for 'training.' He had somehow become the honored guest of the Great Solaris Kingdom,
An 8th-tier power. In a move that shocked the world, he stood with them against not one, but two 8th-tier high-level sects,
The infamous Wild Barbarian Sect and the Ghost Bone Sanctuary. The rumors surrounding this part of the story became truly fantastical.
The Ghost Bone Sanctuary was accused of being a nest of betrayers, agents of the great extraterrestrial races from beyond the sky, a cancer on humanity.
But that wasn't the most absurd part. The Wild Barbarian Sect and the Ghost Bone Sanctuary both possessed what every major power coveted they were helmed by living, breathing Body Integration cultivators.
They were true hegemons, beings who could command the laws of nature. By all logic, the Great Solaris Kingdom and this upstart disciple should have been annihilated.
And they almost were. The rumors claimed that just as Lin Feng was about to fall, the heavens had torn open.
An elder of the Eternal Sect, a youth who looked no older than eighteen, had emerged from the void.
With a single, devastating sword strike that blotted out the sun and filled the sky with a galaxy of sword intent, he had annihilated both sects.
Their mountain ranges were obliterated, their disciples turned to dust, and their two mighty Body Integration patriarchs, beings who should have been immortal and indestructible, were slain without a chance to even fight back.
Of course, no one truly believed it.
To slay a Body Integration expert was a feat of legend. To slay two, simultaneously, with a single sword strike, by an eighteen-year-old… it was beyond absurd.
It was the kind of exaggerated nonsense one would find in a third-rate storyteller's epic, designed to entertain children.
Most sane cultivators assumed the truth was more mundane, the two patriarchs had likely been away or were already gravely injured,
And the Eternal Sect had used some forbidden, single-use artifact to achieve a pyrrhic victory.
Still, even with the rationalizations, the name 'Eternal Sect' had become a taboo, a symbol of extreme and unpredictable violence.
And now, a girl claiming to be from that very sect had just effortlessly, gracefully, and single-handedly turned three hundred Nascent Soul experts into atmospheric dust.
The Thunder Light Sect's Void Refinement elders felt a chill, colder than any winter, run down their spines.
The rumors might be absurd, but the slaughter they had just witnessed was horrifyingly real. Their logical, cultivated minds were at war with the primal terror screaming in their instincts.
Unfortunately for him, Lei Zhan possessed very little logic, and his instincts had been surgically replaced with pure, unadulterated arrogance.
The slap had humiliated him. The laughter had broken him. The death of his subordinates was, to him, merely an inconvenience, an insult to his authority.
He did not see a monster before him; he saw an uppity girl who needed to be put in her place.
He pushed himself to his feet, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his hand, his eyes burning with a venomous, delusional light.
"So what if you are from the Eternal Sect?" he sneered, his voice cracking with hysteria.
"Do you truly believe that I, Lei Zhan, will believe those absurd, fairytale rumors about your pathetic sect? Killing Body Integration experts? What a joke!"
He puffed out his chest, striking a pose he clearly thought was domineering and charming.
"Girl, your power is… interesting. I am a magnanimous man. Submit to me now. Come to my arms and accept me as your master. If you serve me well, maybe, just maybe, I'll give you some time to explore my legendary charms."
He gave a lecherous wink, a grotesque expression of self-satisfaction on his swollen, hand-printed face.
He genuinely believed this was an attractive offer. He was offering her the supreme honor of becoming his plaything.
The entire world went silent. The sheer, galaxy-spanning density of the stupidity on display was enough to momentarily stun every living creature.
Huo Ling'er stared at him. She didn't look angry. She didn't look offended.
She looked at him with the kind of profound, clinical pity a physician might reserve for a patient suffering from a terminal and particularly disgusting brain disease.
Then, she did something that was, in its own way, more violent than her slaughter of the three hundred. She pursed her lips.
" Ptooey !"
A small glob of saliva flew from her mouth and landed on the polished marble floor, just inches from Lei Zhan's expensive boots.
It was an act of such raw, primal disrespect that it transcended all cultural and cultivation boundaries.
Huo Ling'er looked at him, her head tilted. "Huh? Young Master Lei Zhan, is it?" she asked, her voice filled with a saccharine, fake concern.
"Are you… perhaps suffering from some manner of delusion? A sickness of the mind, maybe?"
She tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Tell me, before you came out of whatever thunder-blasted hole you crawled from this morning, did you ever happen to check your face in a mirror? "
"Or even a puddle? Because from here, it looks less like the face of a charming young master and more like something the street dogs left behind after a bad meal."
Silence. Utter, absolute, suffocating silence.
The insult was not merely sharp; it was a work of art. It was a multi-layered masterpiece of mockery,
so visceral and so visually explicit that every person in the hall could perfectly picture the image she had just painted.
The silence lasted for three-point-seven seconds.
It was broken by the Grand Elder of the Azure Mist Sect.
He let out a sound like a drowning walrus. His ancient, dignified face turned bright red, his shoulders began to shake, and then he completely lost control.
"BWAHAHAHAHAHA!"
he roared, clutching his stomach and doubling over, tears streaming from his ancient eyes. "Street dogs! She said… street dogs! Hahaha!"
His laughter was the signal. Like a contagion, it swept through the hall. The other Azure Mist elders, who had been trying desperately to maintain their composure, failed spectacularly. They howled with laughter, slapping their knees, some even falling out of their chairs.
The disciples, the guests, the onlookers in the city they all exploded. It was a tsunami of mirth, even louder and more joyous than before.
They weren't just laughing at an insult; they were laughing at the final, complete implosion of the Thunder Light Sect's dignity.
The faces of Lei Zhan and the ten Void Refinement elders became more than grim. They turned a shade of black that was so deep it seemed to absorb light.
Their auras flared, not with power, but with pure, unrestrained murderous intent. The temperature in the hall plummeted as their killing intent washed over the laughing crowd, but it was stopped cold by the gentle, warm aura still radiating from Huo Ling'er.
Lei Zhan's mind finally snapped. The last vestiges of his sanity were incinerated by the fires of his humiliation.
"KILL THAT BITCH!" he screamed, his voice a raw, ragged shriek of pure hatred.
He pointed a trembling finger at Huo Ling'er, his face a horrifying mask of rage. "I DON'T WANT TO HEAR HER MOUTH RUNNING FOR A SINGLE MOMENT LONGER!"
He turned his crazed eyes to the hundred-plus Soul Transformation beings, the true backbone of his escort.
They nodded grimly, their own faces burning with shame. They were shaken by the death of the Nascent Soul cultivators, but their pride as Soul Transformation masters was immense.
The gap between Nascent Soul and Soul Transformation was not a step; it was a heavenly gulf. A single slap from any of them could kill thousands of Nascent Soul cultivators.
This girl was a prodigy, yes, but she was still just a Nascent Soul peak cultivator. There was a fundamental limit to her power. They would crush her.